WEBCASTING TO CHATBOT HELP: GOA POLLS SET TO GO HIGH-TECH

NEW DELHI: From reducing the use of non-biodegradable items and replacing them with local biodegradable materials, to live-streaming polling to avoid crowding to curtail the spread of Covid-19, the assembly elections scheduled to be held in Goa next year are set for many firsts.

Two systems, designed by the state’s chief electoral officer (CEO) and IIT, are ready for deployment during polling -Voterdost (Chat Bot system for Answering FAQS) and Election Eye, a computer vision based webcasting data analytics system.

“Webcasting of all polling station is undertaken as an additional measure to monitor the polling process. The Election Eye system has been designed to capture real time information from webcasting feeds on computer vision technology.

“It will help in getting realtime alerts to the election authorities towards incidents such as crowding inside polling stations, if any, and also to get queue monitoring outside polling stations,” CEO Kunal said, adding, “This is the first time it is being used.”

Professor Sharad Sinha, who has worked on the project, said the Election Eye concept is a pilot project which will ensure web casting of ongoing polling. “We take video feeds that are not in public domain to analyse how many people are around the polling area to ensure there is no overcrowding,” he said. “The system does not make use of attentive manpower but Ai-based models to recognise people, not who they are, but how many people,” Sinha said. He added that real-time thresholds will ensure there is no crowding in polling stations.

More than 1,000 polling stations are likely to be set up in the state but the project will focus on 100-200 camera feeds (every polling station will have two cameras — one outside and one in the booth).

The Election Commission had come under fire for failing to act against the rising number of Covid-19 cases in January this year and going ahead with the Assembly election in West Bengal during the second wave.

Voterdost, on the other hand, is a Telegram-based Chatbot system that will serve as a one-stop contact point for handling queries of voters.